Chapter Text
Between one moment and the next, Tony Stark came to awareness abruptly, gasping fiercely in spite of the air already present in his very-much-functional lungs. (He couldn’t remember why that particular fact seemed perplexing.)
He felt unsteady. Unmoored. The claustrophobic feeling occupying him wasn’t unlike the sensation of waking up after a dream of falling.
Tony began to raise a hand to his face and noted with no small amount of confusion that it was wet. A quick glance down told him that he was lying in a shallow pool of water; perhaps an inch deep and spanning for as far as he could make out – which incidentally was not far. His confusion only built as he took in his surroundings.
The world around him seemed expansive but out of focus – foggy in a way that meant he had no indication of… anything really. And yet it was also unbearably familiar, even if the context for that association seemed beyond his grasp.
Having caught his breath, he made to stand up, struggling only for a second on weak limbs before managing to righten himself. Figures seemed to swim in the periphery of his vision. He turned his head only to find that they disappeared as soon as he tried to focus on them.
Having faced a horde of aliens invading Manhattan, almost being killed by murder-bots of his own creation and fighting a purple giant in outer space, Tony Stark was no stranger to situations that were both unusual and out of his control. Even so, he was about five seconds from a Major Freakout™ when a voice spoke up, seemingly from behind him.
“Ah. I expected that to be more difficult in all honesty.”
He almost jumped at the words as they broke up the silence, whipping his head around to predictably be met with the sight of no one there.
“Who said that?” If Tony’s voice shook a little, he’d never admit it. Besides, who could blame him given the circumstance.
The voice hummed, soundingly slightly distant. “Who indeed.”
Tony rolled his eyes and steeled himself. Weird situation or not, he wasn’t a fan of the question game.
“Okay yeah Casper, enough with the cryptic ghost act. Who are you? What is this place?”
“I am not what you would call a person. I have no name.” Shivers wracked his spine as the voice spoke. The distant quality also seemed to diminish, as if the owner of the voice was approaching him. “I am neither Time, nor Space or Mind. Not Power or Soul. Not reality, and yet, I am also all of them, all at once. I am merely an Echo of those forces.”
“The stones?” Tony muttered. Because of course. Everything had always been about those damned stones.
“Were you aware that, since the dawn of existence, the Six Singularities haven’t been used within tandem of each other – never mind on four occasions within the span of half a Terran decade.”
“Four occasions?” Tony asked, narrowing his eyes.
“The amount of energy created by such expulsions of power leaves a trace. A trace that has been magnified by every subsequent use. It is within that trace that I exist.”
“No, no, you said four times. Grimace snapped his fingers and killed half of all live, yeah. Then he destroyed the stones all together. That’s two times. So when–”
A massive intake of sounds and images flooded into his head.
Scott Lang and the Pym Particles. The plan. Time travel. Revisiting the Battle of New York. Seeing his father. Bruce snapping his fingers. Thanos’ arrival. The fight. The kid. The stones.
‘You can rest now.’
And then
Nothing.
“Shit.” He blinked incredulously. “I’m dead.”
“You were dead.” The Echo corrected. “I fixed that.”
“I’m sorry, what? You ‘fixed’ death?”
“Your death specifically, Antony Edward Stark. The vestiges of the stones that sustain me are not capable of much under normal circumstances. However, between the meddling of the sorcerer, the Scarlett Witch and the traveller of the Utopian Parallel, the fabric of reality has been stretched thin in recent years, far beyond its normal bounds. It is… simpler, now, to allow minor adjustments to… slip through the cracks.”
“Ahah. Great. No really. I’ve always wanted to be a minor adjustment slipping through the cracks of the fabric of reality.”
“You are… panicking?”
“Really?” Tony asked with a half strangled laugh. The blood was rushing through his veins (blood that had, until recently, rushed nowhere; heart unbeating, eyes unseeing, had his body decayed or was it burned, was dying painless or had he just deleted the memory) and the air in his lungs seemed to be suffocating him. “What gave it away?”
“Hmm. Intriguing. I’d have thought that not being death would be rather quite the relief.”
“Ah,” Tony gasped between shuddering breaths, “Fuck me for being ungrateful, I guess.”
“Already this is proving to be an interesting experiment.” The Echo remarked. “I doubt I’d have had this reaction from the Titan. I see my choice was correct.”
“So w-what you just got bored? Fancied some Saturday night entertainment?”
“Yes. It is a rather plain existence, you understand. The continuation of a consciousness inhabiting an ever diminishing trace of residual energy shaped by the actions of individuals beyond my reach. Beyond my reach until now that is.”
He got the vague impression of an unnerving smile from the formless entity, a weird sensation that, oddly, distracted him from the pounding of his heart.
“How I wish I could keep us here for longer. I do so want to know how it felt. To handle the power of all Six Singularities at once. My, the conversations we could have.”
It sighed.
“Alas the tear I have created here slips away as we speak.”
The voice, which had previously felt close enough to be breathing down his neck, began to fade once more.
“Go now then, Antony Edward Stark, return to your life. And, I implore you, make it entertaining.”
Tony was just about to return with a scathing comment when the world around him shifted, leaving him with a dizzying sense of vertigo. When reality finally righted itself, he found himself sitting alone in a shaded alley – the familiar sounds of the city blaring to life around him.
Tony Stark alive once more.
***
Half an hour and one panic attack later, Tony was remarkably okay with his current predicament.
Well, relatively speaking.
He had died. Kicked the bucket. Shuffled off the mortal coil. Gave up the ghost. Breathed his last.
And now he was back.
Once he’d gotten over the whole being dead thing, he figured that anything else was a markable improvement. Even if that something else consisted of being sat in a damp alley with no phone or suit.
Still, he’d fared under worse conditions. A certain unplanned trip to Tennessee came to mind.
His clothes (which, thankfully, the disembodied voice had seen fit to provide him with) consisted of a pair of trousers and a thin shirt, leaving him woefully underdressed in the brisk weather. A quick search of his pockets confirmed that he had no money however.
Great.
He was half a second from flipping the bird at the sky in the hopes that the Echo – trademark pending – would be watching to appreciate the sentiment, when a young man with shaggy blonde hair stumbled into the alley.
His movements were lethargic and uncoordinated as he fumbled along the wall. The guy, who Tony reckoned couldn’t have been more than 25, was obviously high as a kite. His eyes were bloodshot and hazy, his expression somewhat vacant even as he almost faceplanted into a dumpster.
“Easy there Marty Mikalski,” Tony called out instinctively. It took him a second to catch his own referenced and he felt his heart twist when he did.
Come on, please can we watch it Mr. Stark. Sure, it’s a little scary I guess but, I mean, it’s mostly a parody anyways. And there’s one character who I swear looks just like Thor –
Nope, nope, stop thinking about –
No, Tony corrected himself with mounting relief. The kid isn’t dead anymore.
His thoughts were interrupted as the guy in front of him finally took note of his presence. His face screwed up in concentration before his eyes widened comically. His jaw dropped.
“Woah dude. You’re Tony Man! Iron Stark! Hoooly shit though, you’re dead, dude.” He so politely informed him and then gasped as if recognising a great tragedy. “Nooo, am I dead too?”
Tony thought only for a second before clapping the guy the shoulder.
“Nope, I’m just friendly figment of the imagination. Anyway, that’s a nice coat you have there, mind if I borrow it?”
***
Equipped with his new parka coat, a scarf and a pair of sunglasses that he’d found in the pockets, Tony trailed out of the oh-so-cosy alley to join the flood of pedestrians traversing the street.
He wasn’t sure what the proper protocol was for miraculous resurrection from the dead but he figured that causing public panic was probably a no-go. At best he’d be seen as a lowlife impersonator; at worst he’d be accused of being some shapeshifting alien who was a bit late to the memo that the person it was impersonating was dead.
As it was he’d rather stay undetected until he got his bearings. Ideally, he’d find Pepper, Happy or Rhodey first and, after what he was sure would be a very dramatic but ultimately heartfelt reunion, they could face this mess together.
Tony shifted his scarf higher to cover more of his face. He’d feel bad for taking the guy’s stuff later but, for now, he figured that morals were for people who weren’t currently freezing their extremities off. (Maybe he’d track the guy down later if given the chance and buy him a new coat. Or maybe he was just trying to reassure himself. Oh well, it was too cold to care.)
A quick look at the buildings towering around him confirmed what he’d already suspected – he was in New York. Manhattan by the looks of it.
In the years following from the snap, the city that never sleeps had been a shell of its former self. While traffic congestion and noise pollution had seen markable improvements, the life force of the city itself had suffered greatly. The grand energy and vibrant exuberance that had permeated every unapologetically loud aspect of New York had dimmed in face of the sheer grief shared by its diminished population - the negativity a near physical force.
When they’d found out that Morgan was on the way, Tony had been all too eager to relocate away. At least in the quiet of their lakeside cabin they could pretend that humanity itself wasn’t in a constant state of bereavement.
The difference between then and now was startling, the city having evidently recovered in the time since Tony’s death and the reverse snap. Commuters rushed through the crowds with single minded determination, tourists gawked that the sheer verticality of the buildings and the blare of car horns punctuated the ambient chatter intermittently.
It was so typical of the New York he’d once known that it made him wonder how long, exactly, he’d been gone…
“Excuse me, ” Tony said to a woman idly checking her phone (ironically, a Stark phone), taking care to lower his voice a bit. He briefly entertained the idea of putting on some kind of accent before dismissing it. He’d probably just end up drawing more attention to himself. “Any chance you could tell me today’s date?”
“S’ the seventh.” She muttered without raising her eyes from the screen.
“The seventh of?”
The woman cast him a bemused look at that.
“March.” She elongated the word as if he were a small child.
He decided against asking for the year at the risk of sounding like an escaped asylum patient. His ever-so-heroic last stand had happened in October and, with any luck, it had only been five months since then, although with the cryptic clues from the Echo about ‘circumstantial reality fabric stretching’ being the only reason he could be brought back, he wasn’t entirely optimistic about that.
Thankfully, he didn’t have to wait long to find out for himself.
After a few minutes of vacant wandering, an electric billboard caught his eye as a commercial with a graphic of a familiar red, white and blue shield scrolled into view.
Rogers: The Musical
Catch the final viewing this Summer
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, NYC
July 2026
Tony fought the urge to gag at the mere thought of Cap breaking out into show tunes. Hell, Mr. Star Spangled had probably watched the show’s premier with that stupid humble grin the whole time.
And then it registered in his mind.
2026
That made it roughly two and a half years since he’d kicked it.
God, Morgan would be seven by now. He felt his gut twist at the thought of what his daughter must have gone through. He’d been twenty-one when he lost his parents and it would be a lie to say he’d dealt with it gracefully. At least she would’ve had Pepper.
He took a moment to envision what he was going to say to her when he finally saw her again and swiftly categorised that train of thought as ‘To be dealt with later’.
The next item on his agenda was to get in contact with someone. For the first time in his life, Tony cursed the modernisation of New York for the fact that public payphones were no longer common place. After managing to convince a young man to let him borrow his phone to make a quick call, he wracked his memory for the number he needed.
The call took a second to connect before a voice notified him that the number was no longer in use. Damn it, Pepper must have changed it.
His second call gave him more hope as a dial tone sounded, shortly before going to voicemail.
“This is Happy Hogan. I’m currently abroad on official Stark Industries business and won’t be taking calls. Leave a message if it’s important –”
Tony hung up before the message ended. This wasn’t exactly something he could leave in a message.
He stood there cursing himself that he couldn’t remember Rhodey’s number until the owner of the phone ran out of patience and asked for it back.
Okay, so calling someone was a bust. Surely there was someone in the city he could go to. Someone he could trust.
He began running through his limited options, his mouth twisting in distaste as he considered visiting the wizard sanctum or whatever it was where Strange had hung around, when a newspaper fluttering past on the pavement caught his attention in a blur of red and blue.
A grin spread across his face as he picked it up, a spark of joy and relief seizing in his chest. Sprawled across the front page of the Daily Bugle was a familiar figure caught mid-swing. Though the suit was slightly different, the emblem slightly longer and sharper, the trademark colours of the Spider-Man suit were easily identifiable. The title, however, gave him reason to pause.
The Webbed Menace at it again!
Infamous New York vigilante Spider-Man wreaked havoc during a bank robbery in Midtown Manhattan last Sunday. While witnesses claim that he showed up and fought against the robbers, many suspect a darker reason for the web-head’s timely arrival to the heist. Is it possible that the wall-crawler arranged a deal with the criminals in order to make himself look good, with no regard for the massive collateral damage caused by the ordeal? We here at the Daily Bugle believe it to be not only possible, but probable…
Damn. The kid clearly had a PR problem. Happy was evidently slacking.
Despite the negativity of the article, Tony felt overwhelmingly pleased at seeing solid proof that the kid was still okay. Sure, he’d been able to hug him after the second snap had brought him back, but the reality that Peter Parker truly was no longer dead hadn’t felt quite real until now.
And with any luck, Tony would be able to track him down.